Carte Blanche

off the powder and in turn the plastic. With a huge flare the explosion blew the lock to pieces.
    It also knocked Bond to the floor, amid a shower of wood splinters and smoke. For a few seconds he lay stunned; then he struggled to his feet and staggered to the door, which was open, though jammed. The gap was only about eight inches wide. He grabbed the knob and began to wrest the heavy, stubborn panel open.
    “ Attention! Opgelet! Grozba! Nebzpecí! ”

Chapter 14
    In the site caravan, Severan Hydt and Niall Dunne stood beside each other, watching the old British Army hospital in tense anticipation. Everybody—even the gear-cold Dunne, Hydt speculated—enjoyed watching a controlled explosion bring down a building.
    Since Janssen had not answered his phone and Dunne had heard a gunshot from inside, the Irishman had told Hydt he was sure the security man, Eric Janssen, had to be dead. He had sealed the hospital exits, then sprinted back to the caravan, running like an awkward animal, and had told Hydt that he was going to detonate the charges in the building. It was scheduled to come down tomorrow but there was no reason that the demolition couldn’t be brought forward.
    Dunne had activated the computerized system and pressed two red buttons simultaneously, starting the sequence. An insurance liability policy required that a 180-second recorded warning be broadcast throughout the building in languages representing those spoken by 90 percent of the workers. It would have taken longer to override the safety measure but if the intruder wasn’t buried in the tunnel he was stuck in the mortuary. There was no way he could escape in time.
    If, tomorrow or the next day, someone came asking about a missing person Hydt could reply, “Certainly, we’ll check . . . What? Oh my God, we had no idea! We did all we were supposed to with the fence and the signs. And how could he have missed the recorded warnings? We’re sorry—but we’re hardly responsible.”
    “Fifteen seconds,” Dunne said.
    Silence as Hydt mouthed the countdown.
    The timer on the wall now hit 0 and the computer sent its prearranged signal to the detonators.
    They couldn’t see the flash of the explosions at first—the initial ones were internal and low, to take out the main structural beams. But a few seconds later bursts of light flared like paparazzi cameras, followed by the sound of Christmas crackers, then deeper booms. The building seemed to shudder. Then, as if kneeling to offer its neck to an executioner’s blade, the hospital slowly dipped and went down, a cloud of dust and smoke rolling outward fast.
    After a few moments, Dunne said, “People will have heard it. We should go.”
    Hydt, though, was mesmerized by the pile of debris, so very different from the elegant if faded structure it had been a few moments ago. What had been something was now naught.
    “Severan,” Dunne persisted.
    Hydt found himself aroused. He thought of Jessica Barnes, her white hair, her pale, textured skin. She knew nothing about Gehenna so he hadn’t brought her today, but he was sorry she wasn’t there. Well, he’d ask her to meet him at his office, then drive home.
    His belly gave a pleasant tap. A sensation supercharged by the memory of the body he’d found at Green Way that morning . . . and in anticipation of what would happen tomorrow.
    A hundred deaths . . .
    “Yes, yes.” Severan Hydt collected his briefcase and stepped outside. He didn’t climb into the Audi A8 immediately, though. He turned to study once more the dust and smoke hovering over the destroyed building. He noted that the explosive had been skillfully set. He reminded himself to thank the crew. Rigging charges is a true art. The trick is not to blow up the building but simply to eliminate what keeps it upright, allowing nature—gravity, in this case—to do the job.
    Which was, Hydt now reflected, a metaphor for his own role on earth.

Chapter 15
    Early-afternoon zebra bands of sun and shadow rolled over the low rows of sugar beets in the Fenland field.
    James Bond lay on his back, arms and legs splayed, like a child who’d been making angels in snow and didn’t want to go home. Surrounded by the sea of low green leaves, he was thirty yards from the pile of rubble that had been the old army hospital . . . the pile of rubble that had very nearly entombed him. He was—temporarily, he prayed—deprived of his hearing, thanks to the shock waves from the plastic explosive.